Thomson took his palette knife and put out the fire, painted it and the remains of the Wendigo away, mixed them in with the shore and the woods. Then he took the palette knife to Mac’s body and repaired the scratches and cuts that the beast had made. After he had done that he shook Mac’s hand again and then reached over and scratched me behind the ears. “You both have my thanks,” he said. “I don’t know how you managed to make your way into here, but you saved me. Uncommon bravery, Pat, attacking the Wendigo like that.” He patted me on the head again, and I winced.
“And without you, Mac, Big Goose would never have known to come.”
Mac lifted me into his arms, prepared to leave. “What about you, Tom? Where do you go from here?”
Thomson reached down to a patch of gravel on the shore and picked up his corncob pipe. It had been stepped on, but instead of breaking it had spread into the paint of the shore, but with a few deft moves of his fingers he once again had a working pipe. He lit it, and after sending up some slow, twisting puffs of smoke, he smiled. “Why would I want to go anywhere? Canoe Lake was always my idea of heaven, and everything around you,” here he waved at the surrounding landscape, “was my idea.” He next picked up the paddle, pushed off the canoe and floated out onto the lake. Before he was too far away, he turned and shouted, “Be sure you tell Jim to take good care of this painting! I’d hate to have to leave!” And after one last wave he paddled off towards a horizon that had suddenly leapt forward.
We both took one last look at Thomson’s rendition of creation, watched as it transferred itself from part of our world to a flat painting in front of our eyes. Mac set me down on the floor, and with a smile and a wink he pointed down to one corner, on the sand by the lake.
I stared closely for a second before I saw them: dog tracks, leading off into the bush.
Ancients of the Earth
Through the frozen streets of Dawson, Samuel runs from two cavemen.
They’re well-dressed, these cavemen, one of them even in tie and tails. But their hair is long and scraggly, and Samuel would almost swear that their brows slightly protrude; aside from the already out-of-place fancy dress, a neanderthalian version of your typical northerner, not at all worried about the niceties of polite society, here at the ass end of the nineteenth century.
Except that most northerners, even trappers and prospectors who spend almost all of their time alone in the bush, can speak in more than grunts and gibberish, and Samuel doubts even the most ruthless of them would be so keen to smash in his skull.
It is late in the evening, and the temperature is most certainly below minus twenty. Samuel rounds a corner, skidding on packed snow and patches of ice, but he retains his balance. Down an alley to his right he catches a glimpse of two more, one a cavewoman, resplendent in a glittering evening gown, which is up around her waist as the male apparently has his way with her from behind. They both yell inarticulately as Samuel passes them by but do not break off their primeval assignation.
Another yell tells him the first two cavemen are back on his trail.
He rounds another corner, and the door to a dilapidated cabin swings open. From the blackness within a voice quietly calls to him. “Quickly! Inside!”
Samuel does as he is bid, and the door closes behind him. It is darker inside than out; he can see nothing, but outside, over the pounding of the blood in his temples, he hears the footsteps of the two cavemen going past and strains to listen as they fade into the distance.
He hears his rescuer stand and shuffle over to the window. In the sliver of light allowed in from outside, he can see now who it is. “How’d you get here?” he asks.
She puts a finger to her lips and holds up her other hand, and pretty soon two more sets of footsteps go running by, accompanied by words in a guttural, prehistoric tongue. When they’re gone she sits on the floor beside him. “They saw me when they first arrived, but I don’t think they’re after me. Still, I came here to stay safe until they’re gone.”
Samuel frowns. “How do you get to be so lucky? The moment they saw me I could see they wanted to get all over me like sled dogs on a bone.”
She takes his hand and feels at the makeshift bandage he still has wrapped there. “I think you know.”
Twenty-Two Days Earlier
Two miners managed to melt and dig their way through a patch of permafrost at the bottom of a stub of a cliff, and there they found the remains of a strange and large creature. News spread round the town, and soon a gaggle of onlookers stood in the mud surrounding the site, watching as the still-frozen remains were dug up.
Once the creature was finally completely disinterred from its grave of ice and soil, several of the bystanders allowed that they thought it looked something like an elephant. Perhaps a circus had come through town, one time long before anyone there could remember, and one of the beasts had passed on and been taken out onto the bush and pitched over the edge of the cliff and then had somehow been missed by the wolves and crows until it had finally been swallowed by the frozen earth.
No, by consensus that didn’t seem at all likely.
Standing in the cold wind, staring down at the remains of an alien creature that looked as if it could have died just yesterday, one of the miners had the idea to fetch Samuel. He was book smart, was Samuel, a former schoolteacher who’d come north to make his fortune in a fashion that involved as few personal ties and relationships as possible.
Unlike the miners who had discovered the creature, when the gold rush had petered out Samuel had given up on his stake and settled into his one-room cabin, writing the odd dispatch for the local rag and tutoring ill-lettered prospectors in exchange for flakes of gold dust or odd fossils that they felt had no value. Once Fanny Alice had even given him a molar from what Samuel assumed was a mammoth, one that she’d been given by a customer, and that tooth—larger than his fist, yellowed and dirty and well-worn from an apparently long life of grinding down vegetation—held a special place of pride in his small collection. She had told him that it had special “properties,” but he had dismissed that as exaggeration.
It so happened that Samuel was just bidding farewell to one of his students—scraggly and unkempt, smelling of tallow and burnt caribou flesh, as they all did—when a small crowd seemed to spontaneously form on the icy patch of road beside his sagging gray front stoop. He blinked in surprise at the sight of so many people, wondering if perhaps he’d drunkenly promised a group lesson the other night while consuming his self-assigned monthly allotment of alcohol.
“We need you to come see somethin’, Samuel,” said a trapper named Ozark who had a line not too far from town and who would come into town for drinks himself. “Mick and Temple come up with some strange creature while they was diggin’ at their claim, and we figure you’re the man who can tell us what the hell it is.”
Samuel scratched his head. “A creature, you say. How do you mean, like a bear or something?”
“Nope,” said Fanny Alice, who was out pretty early in the day considering the line of work she was in. “Bigger than that. Looks somethin’ like a smaller version of Jumbo the elephant.”
It turned out to not be an elephant. At least, not exactly.
The creature was still young, that much was apparent. Not just the fact that it was only about five feet tall at the shoulder, but also that there was something ineffably youthful about its appearance, like how a puppy could easily be distinguished from an adult dog. Excepting, of course, that this creature was not actually a dog.
It had a trunk, just like an elephant, but its ears were small and its tusks were still just ivory nubs, and it was covered with thick reddish-brown fur. It lay on its side in the partially frozen mud, and Samuel could see that a puddle was beginning to form below its belly as it thawed in the weak mid-day sun, which was soon to disappear behind the small overhang immediately behind Samuel.
After a moment or two of searching, Samuel found his voice. “That’s no elephant,” he said, and he jumped down in
to the mud beside the beast. “It’s a woolly mammoth.” He grinned up at Fanny Alice. “A young one probably of the same type as the one that tooth you gave me last year came from.”
“A woolly what?” asked one of the miners.
“Mammoth,” said Samuel. “Probably an ancestor or distant cousin of the elephant, from many—many—thousands of years ago.” He looked back down at the animal’s corpse. “Maybe even longer.”
“An antediluvian beast somehow washed up on our frozen and landlocked shores,” said Pete Marliss, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. Pete was a town councilman, a large and florid man with a full thatch of white hair and an equally white and bristly beard. He was also a local hotelier as well as a lapsed Presbyterian minister who still sometimes exhibited signs of that faith. “Certainly anything older than the time of Noah is, of course, impossible. It seems obvious to me that this poor unfortunate beast was unlucky enough to step off the edge of the ark one unfortunate night, perhaps as the result of a stumble when the vessel bumped up against an iceberg. Its poor mate likely spent the rest of its days alone and despondent, aware that she was the last of her kind.”
Samuel glared at Pete for a moment, astonished by his delusional line of reasoning, but after searching for the right words he finally shrugged in response. He knew from tired experience that there was no sense in stepping into an argument with Pete. Instead, he turned his attention back to the baby mammoth and put his hand on its shaggy coat and instantly felt the shock of ages drift past and run up through his arm and through his body, grappling with his memories all the way. For a fraction of a second he saw and smelled a different world, enormous stretches of gleaming white punctuated by small oases of green, and then he felt himself stumble as a dreadful pain lanced into his right side.
He snatched his hand away and sat down hard on the mud beside the creature, rubbing his ribs until the ghost pain died away. When he finally thought to once again pay attention to his surroundings, he saw that Fanny Alice was bending over and had her hands on his face, trying to get his attention.
“I’m with you,” he said, and gingerly he stood again. “Sorry about that. I don’t know what happened there.”
Now, it was widely accepted that Fanny Alice was not the best-looking woman to ever practice her trade, but it was also well known that she had some conjuring skills and that some of those skills involved activities in the non-marital bed. But other skills of hers had nothing to do with physical bliss, and she was often useful that way, seeing the magic in life when others might have completely missed it.
This, Samuel was sorry to realize, appeared to be one of those times.
“Somethin’s reached out and touched you,” she said, and she herself reached out and put a hand on his side, where he’d felt the sharp pain. “I don’t know that I recognize it, but I can tell you that I don’t like it. It looked like very old magic, and very powerful as well. Certainly different than the magic in that tooth I gave you.”
Samuel’s own experiences with magic had been low-key and usually from a great remove. He was disinclined to think that this had been anything other than sheer imagination, him working himself to a state of great agitation and excitement over such a discovery. At worst, though, it could only have been an echo of something from thousands of years before, long dead and forgotten but still hanging in the fabric of the world, like ripples at the edge of a large pond long after the rock had been dropped. So he smiled and shook his head in disagreement. “I’m just fine, Fanny Alice, and you can be assured that there was no magic involved. Only me being overwhelmed by the idea of reaching across millennia and touching flesh that could as easily have been alive only days before.” He walked away from her and from the corpse of the mammoth, stepping gingerly even though the pain had long since faded. “I’ll tell Ed he should get down here and take a picture for the paper. And maybe we should consider getting word out to some scientists somewhere.” Suddenly completely and mind-numbingly exhausted, Samuel raised his hand to bid them all farewell and shuffled back to town and to his cabin, fighting the urge the whole way to look back over his shoulder in case he was being followed.
No, not followed. Stalked.
*
The herd is in a panic, spread out across the open land, any hope of working together defensively gone, that hope scattered to the cold winds as effectively as each member of the herd. He runs, terror crushing his heart and his breathing ragged and punctuated by desperate pleas to his mother, to any of the aunties, but none of them answer.
He risks a turn of his head and sees that the two-legs are still after him, coming up the side of the hill. They raise their sticks, and some are thrown at him. He feels a horrible pain in his side and stumbles and bleats in fear and pain but regains his feet and continues running. But then one of the aunties comes to his rescue and heads off the creatures running hard on his heels. A toss of her head sends several of them flying through the air, and he is free of them, still running, still feeling that agonizing pain in his side but unwilling to stop while fear remains.
The ground gives way, and he first stumbles and then falls and falls some more. Pain returns, but after a few moments that fades away, as does everything else.
Weird dreams plagued Samuel’s night, and he awoke with the pain in his right side renewed. He lay there for a spell, unwilling to jump from his warm cocoon of a bed and dash for the stove to rekindle the fire before having to make an even madder and colder dash to the corner to piss in his bucket. Staring at the ceiling, though, all he could think of was that dead animal and the fact that he was likely the only one in town who knew just how significant and important it was.
Having an interest in things prehistoric, Samuel fancied himself as pretty knowledgeable about fossils and such. But he thought it pretty obvious that you didn’t need to have even a marginal interest to know that a find such as the frozen body of the baby mammoth would be of vital importance to scientists and to newsmen. Pretty obvious often didn’t cut through the fat up here, though, since you could never tell just how capable any one person was at recognizing what was required of them in a social situation.
And so with a strangled cry he threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, the cold floor clawing at him even through his woollen socks, the air working quickly to find its way to his skin through his undergarments. The embers were low, but some dry kindling and a few choice gusts from his lungs got the flames hopping again, and after adding a small log he ran to the corner and did his morning business, desperately happy to tuck things in when he was done and run back to the stove to put on a pot of two-day-old coffee and feel the tenuous curtain of heat reach slowly outward from the fire and find its way to the farthest corners of the cabin.
Once his fingers were warm enough and the jolt of tar-like coffee had re-ignited his brain, he gave the juvenile mammoth more thought. Obvious as it was to him, he knew he couldn’t rely on anyone else from town to do the right thing about the animal. He’d told Ed to go down and get a picture, but wasn’t sure if that would translate itself to an attempt to get the news out to the world at large. If anything, he feared that instead it would result in someone contacting some two-bit circus impresario, and there would go any chance for any true science to be done. Or worse, someone with magical powers, either real or imagined, would make some wild and bizarre claim about the creature that would lead to some freakish hoodoo rites being performed as its body was burned at a makeshift altar.
He had a quick breakfast and then got dressed, all the while working through his mind how he could word a telegram to make the most impact, convince people to come here at this time of year rather than them asking for the corpse to be packed in a railroad car full of blocks of ice and shipping it on to Skagway and then south by boat to California. And hour later he found himself at the telegraph office, pen and paper in hand, dashing off a note to his sister’s husband in Toronto. The fellow was a teacher and was smart enough to know who to approach and how to do so
.
Unfortunately, Fanny Alice’s words kept drifting back into his head every time he made to write his message, and several fits and starts were only able to produce sad attempts such as “Mystical find of great value, send help” and “Dead baby mammoth. Frozen. Of interest to someone warmer” and “Frozen mammoth body dug up nearby, how did it die?” This last was moderately conversational but not at all useful in getting across the main point, which was of course that someone with a modicum of expertise needed to come north forthwith and be here to supervise any investigations into the former life of this extinct creature.
He shook his head to clear it of all of Fanny Alice’s nonsense about magic. Finally, he decided he needed to splurge for a few extra words, and soon enough the message was sent. “Frzn baby mammoth found whole. Get news out. None here qualified. Hurry.” Satisfied, he left the office and headed over to see what Ed had for photos and how he intended to run with the story, perhaps even talk him into allowing Samuel to write something about the beast and what he knew of its former life.
Ed was at his desk wearing his shit-eating grin when Samuel walked in. “You done good telling me to go out and get a picture of that beast, Samuel!” He jumped up and ran to the darkroom and hurried out with a handful of pictures he’d taken of the mammoth, all but one with Mick and Temple posing beside the body, the miners who’d found the creature. The exception was a picture of the baby mammoth with Pete Marliss, doing his best to look important as only a town father should. Even in a moderately out-of-focus photograph he managed to look like a stuffed-shirt blowhard.
“Glad it worked out for you,” said Samuel. “Bet you one of these pictures ends up in a big paper down south somewhere.”
Ed grinned again. “Just about guaranteed, I’d say. I sent a telegram first thing when I got back from taking the pictures yesterday. Pretty sure there’ll be some newsmen coming up from Edmonton, or maybe across from Alaska. And my pictures’ll be the only ones they can use!” He sounded positively gleeful at this.
Over the Darkened Landscape Page 19
